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Obviously anything that puts curses into circulation would be anathema. I'm not necessarily looking for one player to have the highest score possible, so much as to have games where everyone's scores where really high.

I figure Monument is obvious, and Great Hall, Island, etc. seem like they might also contribute to a high scoring game.
On the other hand if there are tons of non-terminal action cards and Vinyards that could lead to some pretty ridiculous scores as well.

You might want to clarify if you're looking for a set that has high scores when players are playing to win, or when players are cooperating to obtain high overall scores.
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Neal TibrewalaFeb 6 '12 at 18:29

10 Answers
10

I've played hundreds of games on the dominon android app -- which randomly selects card sets. The highest scoring (single turn) hand ever was 38 victory points. The deck needed to have these cards to make the combo work:

Early game: other players need to buy the bishop and use it. This lets you thin our your estates and coppers. Meanwhile, you buy silver (3) and caravans (4), then cultists (5) and goons (6). Having 2 caravans and 3 cultists and 1 goon will ensure you can fill the other players up with ruins AND draw your entire deck, which you will use exclusively to buy gold and platinum, 1 counterfeit and 3 city cards for the mid-game.

End game: If you have at some point a deck with 3 cultists, 2 goons, 1 counterfeit, 2-4 caravans, and at least 3 platinum and several more gold and silver pieces, you will eventually manage to pull off the 38 point combo turn.

Combo: play your caravans and city cards first, then your cultists, which are useful as a "draw 2" card that keeps playing more cultists as a free action. This can usually get you enough cards in hand to have 20+ gold. Also, because you've used the cultists to load everybody else up with ruins they will probably be buying up all the duchies. But in order to seal the deal the counterfeit card is absolutely essential, as are drawing 2 goons cards. Goons and counterfeits give you extra buys, and each colony is essentially worth 12 victory points if you buy it after playing Goons twice.

Any sort of pin with monument would get an unlimited score. 5 Card deck, King's Court, King's Court, Monument, Monument, Masquerade would see your opponent (in a 2-player game), only have two cards to play with, and eventually only have one (assuming coppers haven't run out). As they can only buy out 2 piles (excluding ruins), the game will never end, and you will get 6 points every turn and never need to buy anything else. Any variation of a pin (where your opponent can only buy copper or curses each turn) + VP tokens will see a potentially unlimited score.

Other 5 card hand variations:
The addition of Prince (new card, cost 8), would also make for potentially higher scores per turn if monument was set aside, or bishop with fortress in hand.

The AI bug in question is that one of the AI opponents will buy and play exclusively Rats, thinning their deck down to the 20 Rats in the supply and cycling through them indefinitely. This left me free to purchase every other card on the board (Final deck size of 248). The final VP breakdown:

This isn't responding to the scenario the asker is after: "I'm not necessarily looking for one player to have the highest score possible, so much as to have games where everyone's scores where really high." (It's also not remotely close to the current highest suggestions.)
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doppelgreenerOct 4 '14 at 14:16

Goons + Ambassador allows for potentially infinite scores (VP chips from Goons purchases and Ambassadors to return cards to the supply so the game never ends on piles). Obviously some serious support would be necessary in terms of drawing, +actions to play all the Goons, and likely KC to return cards to the supply fast enough with Ambassador.

Er... The highest scoring game is a game where, in additions to buying all the provinces or colonies, there are way to get a lot of VP. I had games with over 100 vp and I knew I could do better in perfect scenario. For example, king's court king's court fully activated cities then play 6 goons at once will get you infinite buys (like 42 buys) and each buy is 6 VP in addition to whatever victory point it gives you. With watch tower you can trash all the coppers right away and repeat this again. You should be able to do this twice. So I think you can theoritically get more than 500 points.
I just played a game that had something similar happened. If I had more goons and if there was a watchtower then I would be able to do it.

I am starting to do some analysis of games on the online dominion server at http://dominion.isotropic.org. The top 5 scoring games there all involve a combination of Goons and King's Court. These are all solo games where people are trying to run up the score, so they aren't representative. But from my experience, Colony, Goons, Vineyard, Bishop, Duke, and Gardens all contribute to really high scores in real games.

An important side note that was not mentioned five years ago: Goons will only ever award you 1 victory point per card you buy per Goons card in play. King's Court does not increase this. This is because it's a "While this is in play" effect and a King's Courted Goons is still only a single card.
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PowerlordJun 8 at 19:25

For reference, Highway is another card affected by this wording, while Bridge is not.
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PowerlordJun 8 at 19:27

Consider this a specialized house rules set of cards because normally with two players you would not use 12 of every card, and I don't think Colony and Platinum are meant to be used this way... but we had fun!

We played a two player game where we decided to not end the game until the very last moment possible. We just wanted to see how high we could get our scores and how long the game would last (about 1-1.5 hrs). We played until two of the supply stacks ran out then it was a race to get whatever other supply cards we wanted until there was 1 left at which point we were no longer allowed to buy from that stack because it would end the game. We just kept buying from other supply stacks until nothing was left and we ended the game buying either the last Province or Colony.

The final score was 223 to 205. We each had between 102-109 cards in our decks so Gardens were worth 10 each. I think only 3 Colonies were sold throughout the game. The score could have been higher if more Colony cards had been purchased before the game ended with the last Province sold or if more cards were in our decks causing the Gardens to be worth more. These are the cards we used:

No, not indefinitely. There are a limited number of cards in the supply, and when 3 stacks are empty the game is over. If you are forced to buy when you can, simple math will show the max number of buys before the game ends.
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atkOct 4 '14 at 13:43